In Long Term Evolution (LTE) based cost-effective Machine Type Communication (MTC), coverage enhancement needs to be performed on coverage of an LTE network, so as to ensure that user equipment (UE) can reliably communicate with a base station when the UE is in a basement or channel quality is poor. In an existing LTE or LTE-A (LTE Advanced) system, time-domain resources are divided as radio frames, and the radio frames are numbered 0 to 1023. One radio frame includes 10 subframes, a time length of one subframe is 1 millisecond (1 ms), and subframes in each radio frame are numbered 0 to 9. In the existing LTE or LTE-A system, a physical broadcast channel (PBCH) for carrying one time of transmission of an master information block (MIB), a physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) for scheduling one time of transmission of an system information block type 1 (SIB 1), a physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) for carrying one time of transmission of the SIB 1, a PDCCH for scheduling one time of transmission of system information (SI), and a PDSCH for carrying one time of transmission of the SI are all transmitted in one subframe.
In the case of coverage enhancement, the base station may transmit MIB information multiple times to improve transmission reliability of an MIB, and a PBCH for carrying multiple times of transmission of the MIB may be referred to as an enhanced PBCH. Similarly, the base station may transmit control information multiple times to improve transmission reliability of the control information, and a PDCCH for carrying multiple times of transmission of the control information may be referred to as an enhanced PDCCH; the base station may transmit data multiple times to improve transmission reliability of the data, and a PDSCH for carrying multiple times of transmission of the data is referred to as an enhanced PDSCH. The data herein includes, but is not limited to, an SIB 1, SI, another SIB, unicast data, a paging message, a random access response, or other common data.
In the existing LTE or LTE-A system, a time division duplex (TDD) configuration is included in an SIB 1, where which subframes are special subframes and configurations of the special subframes are determined in the TDD configuration; and an multicast-broadcast single-frequency network (MBSFN) subframe configuration is included in an SIB 2, and system information (SI) cannot be transmitted in a special subframe or an MBSFN subframe. However, in the case of coverage enhancement, UE that requires coverage enhancement cannot learn the TDD configuration and the MBSFN subframe configuration before receiving the SIB 1 and the SIB 2. Therefore, when enhanced transmission is performed on first information, a subframe used in the enhanced transmission cannot be determined, thereby lowering transmission reliability of the first information. The first information may be a master information block, an SIB including a TDD configuration, or an SIB including an MBSFN subframe configuration. The enhanced transmission may be repeated transmission, spread spectrum transmission, transmission time interval bundling transmission, power increased transmission, or retransmission.